Modern essays

Modern Essays is less a single sustained argument than a curated argument about the essay itself, and that is what gives it its pleasure. Morley approaches the genre with the confidence of someone who believes prose should have a pulse, and the selections reflect that faith: digressive when they need to be, sharp when they can be, and always interested in the mind at work. This is an anthology for readers who enjoy watching intelligence make its way across a page, changing direction, doubling back, and landing somewhere sharper than where it began. It feels dated in surface concerns, but not in its appetite for lucidity.

What survives best here is the sense that essays are a democratic form with aristocratic standards. Morley is drawn to writers who can be conversational without becoming slack, reflective without becoming self-indulgent, and he clearly values voice as much as polish. That matters. Too many anthologies treat the essay as a species of watered-down criticism; Morley treats it as a place where personality, judgment, and aesthetic pleasure collide. Read this alongside the great essayists of the early twentieth century and you can see the lineage plainly: the urbane confidence of E. B. White before E. B. White, the portable intelligence of Woolf, the sly essayistic self-awareness that later writers would refine rather than invent.

The best thing about Modern Essays is its ear. Even when the prose is formal by contemporary standards, it is rarely dead. Morley seems to have a real affection for the sentence that turns, the aside that reframes a thought, the paragraph that begins in one register and ends in another, and that affection keeps the book from feeling like a museum piece. There is an old-fashioned civility here, yes, but also a useful reminder that criticism can be hospitable without becoming vague. In an era when so much online commentary mistakes speed for acuity, this collection insists on patience, texture, and the slow accumulation of thought.

My reservation is simple: the book’s taste can feel narrower than its title promises. Modern Essays is committed to a certain educated, genteel, Anglo-American literary sensibility, and that commitment sometimes hardens into limitation; the anthology rarely seems interested in voices outside a fairly circumscribed cultural corridor, and its idea of “modern” is more canonical than adventurous. That is a real flaw, not just a historical footnote. The collection can also flatten its own range by preferring polish over risk, so the reader looking for formal disruption, anger, or voices from the margins will not find much here. Morley loves the essay, but he loves a well-behaved essay most of all.

Still, I would recommend it to anyone who wants to understand why the essay endured as a serious literary form. Modern Essays is not radical, but it is not trivial either; it belongs to that class of books that preserve an era’s assumptions while also revealing its intellectual confidence, and those are often more instructive than cleaner, more self-conscious canons. If you want essays that behave like small, exacting pieces of thought rather than decorative prose blocks, this delivers. It is a book about taste, and like all books about taste, it tells you as much about the editor as it does about the genre.